Jeremiah 3:19
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Good evening church. Our verse tonight as Mike said is from the book of Jeremiah chapter 3 verse 19. Our verse tonight is a word from the Lord and it carries with it a bit of an emotional tone. It reveals, it's one of those verses that reveals the heart of the Lord a little bit. It takes him from being this static sovereign ruler moving pieces around on a chessboard to showing some of his heart, maybe a little bit of emotion in what he's conveying to his people, maybe some level of regret or even deep disappointment at the situation that Israel has put itself in. One of my dear friends, Ben Roberson, tells a story of an epic camping trip he took one year where the start of the trip involved an 11-hour horseback ride, 11 hours.
And at the start of that trip, the cowboy leading the group turned around in his saddle and looked at the group he was with, and he said, I have two pieces of advice. One, it is what it is, and it ain't what it ain't. And the second piece of advice is not appropriate to share in this room. But if you run into Ben, maybe he can share that with you sometime. But what he was conveying was, you know what we're up against today with this trip. And if you do something contrary to what I've told you to do and you get this group in trouble, there's no store or hospital to take care of us.
We're going to have to deal with it. We're going to deal with whatever it is we get ourselves into. It feels like the Lord is almost taking a second here in Jeremiah, surveying Israel, sighing, looking at it and saying, it is what it is and it ain't what it ain't. Israel has not been obedient. The Lord is angry with them not following him the way that he's asked them to. And he's dealing with them now. So let's read our verse for tonight. Jeremiah 3, verse 19. I said how I would set you among my sons and give you a pleasant land, a heritage most beautiful of all nations.
And I thought you would call me my father. It would not turn from following me. So the main idea for our verse tonight is our sin has devastating consequences, but God's grace is a sure refuge. Our sin has devastating consequences, but God's grace is a sure refuge. We're in the flow of a long word from the Lord that he's proclaiming through Jeremiah the priest to his now fractured chosen people.
Israel had been chosen by the Lord as his special people. He liberates them from slavery out of the land of Egypt, delivers them to the land that he promised, wipes all of their enemies clear out of their way, promises to live with them as their God, provided they live as a reflection of who he is by following his law. And as Jeremiah illustrates in verse 18, they basically got settled and lazy and forgot who the Lord is and what it is that he's done for them. Idolatry breaks out in its most grotesque forms all over the land.
Civil war breaks out. The kingdom is split between the north and the south. Many of the people in the north, known as Israel at this point, are taken captive by other nations. There's not many of them even left in that land. And everything is broken and in ruin. And our section comes from words the Lord told Jeremiah to speak towards Israel. The tone is heavy. the Lord is hitting them with wave after wave, listing out their sin, reminding them that he's seen it all and none of it is hidden from him. While listing out their sin, he calls Judah treacherous. He calls Israel faithless. You've polluted the land with your vileness, he says.
You refuse to be ashamed. You wear the lifeblood of the guiltless poor. Even to the wicked women, you have taught your ways. And yet intermingled in all of these judgments, the Lord still offers some glimmers of hope. He's also weaving in some reminders that if they still would return and repent and come back to him, he's merciful and gracious and he will forgive. And that's where we find ourselves in verse 19. So we've got two points I want to consider. Point one is the disastrous results of sin. The disastrous results of sin. So the overarching assumption in this statement by the Lord is that Israel has ruined something by their refusal to follow him. Sin has consequences. The Lord will not allow sin. In the verse following ours, he calls Israel out for leaving him like a treacherous wife leaves her husband. Because they have turned from following
the Lord, they are not set among his sons. They don't have the pleasant land. They aren't enjoying a beautiful inheritance. They don't know the Lord as father. Your sin, big or small, everyone has disastrous effects on your relationship with the Lord. The holy, perfect God cannot overlook them. Your sin, big or small, has disastrous effects on everything happening here in a horizontal dimension. Your relationships, your life path, your well-being are always right on the brink of potentially ruining any of those things. Look at just what our verse, just one out of 30,000 in the Bible. Just this one verse says is broken by sin. The Lord says he would have set Israel among his sons. Our culture views the world through a pretty individualistic lens. I can't imagine for
an Israelite in that day who viewed things as more of a community-based type of worldview, what weight it must have conveyed for the high king of the universe to declare, You are mine and among my family. The sense of security and place and standing that a statement like that would have carried for an Israelite is insane. There would be no higher level of honor or sense of belonging that could have been found anywhere in the world in that time.
And yet, because of their sin, that was gone. Individualistic people, though we may be, we're all still desperate for a sense of belonging to something. Our heart burns when we feel we have no friends, when we have no community. Ultimate community is continually offered to us through our social media presence, through glorifying a friendship, maybe a dating relationship, our workplace, maybe a gym membership.
And great as those things may be, they never fully fill us up. When we see a group of people gathering together, tied by some common bond, enjoying one another, we feel that we're on the outside looking in, that's painful. We get that nagging sense that we just don't belong. But to have the one who ultimately decides what is true and what is worthless, who created everything, who says what is right and what is wrong, definitively say, because you turn from following me, you are not set among my sons.
That is a devastating blow at the highest level. You aren't left wondering, maybe if I do enough, I can get in. Maybe if I try hard enough, I can be a part. No, it's laid out very bare. Because of your sin, you are not one of mine. The Lord says he would have given them a pleasant land. A heritage most beautiful of all nations. Land was, perhaps more so then, even more so than today, intricately tied to a nation's sense of value in those days.
And when Israel followed the law of the Lord, they had a place. They reflected his glory. It says that they enjoyed a fountain of living waters, just continual provision from the Lord. They had good things. They had the fruit of the land. They had the protection of the Lord from the chaos surrounding them. But because they turned from following the Lord, all of that was lost. Your sin, apart from Christ, places you in a dangerous, exposed place.
The sin that offers you joy and peace leads you to a vulnerable position wherein you have no place with the Lord. No glory to hold up to him. There's no settled place for you to find your footing and declare with certainty that your future is secure. No hope to turn to for protection from the God who sees all sin and is just to judge it. The sin that you cling to as a crutch will give way and there will be none to help shield you once that crutch is gone. Your sin obliterates the possibility of any pleasant place to be and feel secure.
Point two, foreshadowing hope, foreshadowing hope. So as I said, even so, in the face of just rank rebellion against the Lord, he still calls Israel again and again to return to him. In verse 19, he pleads with them, return to him, that all hope is not lost. He promises he is gracious and merciful if they would repent and turn from their sin. The Lord of Jeremiah 3 is still the Lord of today. He calls you repeatedly to repent of your sin and turn to him, that all hope is not lost.
But more than that, he gave us Jesus. Jesus who did not turn from following him, who never sinned. Jesus who was the perfect son, who never swerved to the right or the left from following the law. It was Jesus that the Lord ultimately set as his son. It was Jesus that the Lord spoke of when he said, While Israel looked to the promised land or the temple for God's presence, Jesus said, speaking of himself, The promised land was never the end goal.
It was always a foreshadowing of how God truly planned to dwell with his people, which was through Jesus. There is no one who rested more securely in the presence of the Lord than Jesus. There is no one who had a greater heritage handed to him by the Father than Jesus. And there's no one who did not turn from following the Lord like Jesus. And yet, in the face of your rebellion against the Lord, he gave all of that away so that you could have what he has. Jesus, Jesus, who had enjoyed the full presence of the Father, suffered on the cross outside of the gate, the writer of Hebrews says.
Not in the place where God communes with his people, but in the place where those unclean and those who were to be banished from God's presence were put. He removed himself from being set as God's son. He allowed himself to be banished from his presence. And he gave up his beautiful inheritance because as he was on the cross, he was wearing your sin so that you can have all the blessings that you could have never earned on your own. While you turn from following him, the Lord opens his arms wide and says, I have already done everything that's needed for you to come to me.
Repent of your sin and return to me. Brothers and sisters, if you have been a Christian for a long time, do not become cavalier with your sin. It's easy to do because it requires work. But the joy on the back end of accepting grace from God because of what Jesus did when you recognize your sin is what creates deep, lasting joy. If there's sin that you see in yourself, in your friend, in your spouse, don't neglect the duty that you have to draw their eyes to their sin and then draw their eyes to Jesus. When you're on the receiving end of someone calling you out for your sin, don't be like the Israelites and stiffen your back in the face of it. You will want to. We don't like being told that we're wrong or that we're doing something wrong.
When your spouse takes a moment to point out some sinful pattern in your life, sit there for a second with your mouth closed and consider what they're saying. Yeah, but he says it in such a mean way. Or she's not very good at how she delivers these truths to me. That may be. But he or she may also be right. Pause for a moment before you go to battle and listen to what they're saying to you.
The light you see yourself in is probably not as accurate as you think that it is. I'm sorry to tell you that. It may be that the Lord is using your friend or your spouse to knock some of that sin out of you. So pause for a moment and consider when being confronted. Don't treat sin lightly by overindulging in mercy at the cost of confronting sin. This friend is going through a hard time. We'll address his addiction later. It's somewhat understandable, given what he's experiencing.
She's very overwhelmed with her finances right now. We'll let this behavior slide. This person has just experienced a tremendous degree of trauma. I can overlook the unhealthy parts of his response. Jesus is gentle and lowly. Praise the Lord. He meets you in broken places. But even Jesus used his gentleness and lowliness to often draw people's eyes to their sin so that they could understand who he is and what he was doing for them.
The Lord doesn't seem to carve out a space in this verse or anywhere else that I can find in Jeremiah so far where he allows Israelites to pass on their idolatry because they have a broken psyche or because they're in an emotionally fragile state. Jesus will meet with you in broken places, but I promise you will not find a silver bullet excuse when you stand before the Lord and he says, I saw you when you turned from following me. You will not have an excuse for your sin.
When ministering to a broken person, there is wisdom to exercise on when and in what manner to confront sin. Carrying around a pharisaical whipping stick and just swinging it whenever and however you want is not wise. But don't allow your friend to persist in sinful behavior just because they're having a hard time. Walk with them, draw their eyes to their sin where it's needed to be, and then take them to Jesus. Don't treat sin lightly by neglecting repentance in your personal prayer time.
Survey the things you most often pray for. Are they filled with petitions for help with anxiety? That's great. Are you also asking the Lord to forgive you when you are worried about tomorrow or what's to come in the future? Whenever you're reading scripture, take a moment and look at it. See if there's anything in the word that's revealing sin in your heart. Take a moment, repent of it, and take it to the Lord. Your sin is a disaster. The effects of sin is a disaster. But God's grace through Jesus is a sure refuge.
Take your sin to him and believe that our great Redeemer's blood is sufficient no matter what. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for being a just judge of sin. Thank you for your word that shows us sin. Lord, we pray that you would forgive us and you would convict us of sin that we may not even see in our own heart. Help us to be humble when being confronted. Help us to be bold, to confront sin and others as we are trying to walk this life of faith.
Draw our eyes to the grace that's offered to us through Jesus, his blood, and his resurrection. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.